Steppenwolf's New Play Disrupts Gay Narratives

The stage at Steppenwolf Theatre Company goes dark for a full ten seconds before the lights snap on to reveal a man sitting alone at a kitchen table, eating cereal. He doesn't look up. He doesn't perform. He just eats. This is how "Afterimage," a new play by Chicago-based playwright Marcus Webb, begins—not with a monologue about identity, not with a coming-out scene, not with any of the narrative scaffolding audiences have learned to expect from queer theater. It starts with breakfast. Webb's play, which opened last month at Steppenwolf's main stage, has become the most urgent conversation happening in Chicago theater right now, and for reasons that should matter to anyone tired of how gay stories get told on stage. The play follows a man named David—played with startling restraint by actor James Vincent Meredith—through a week after his boyfriend leaves him. That's it. No violence, no illness, no societal reckoning. Just a breakup, rendered with such specificity and such refusal to sentimentalize that it becomes radical. What makes "Afterimage" remarkable is what it refuses to do. There are no speeches about queer resilience. There are no moments designed to make the audience feel good about themselves for witnessing gay suffering. Webb doesn't deploy the visual or emotional shorthand that has calcified into cliché in mainstream queer theater—the kind of work that nationals outlets like The Advocate tend to celebrate as "groundbreaking" while missing the actual formal innovation happening. Here in Chicago, where we've built a theater tradition on specificity and refusal, "Afterimage" feels like the logical next step: a play that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort without demanding they leave the theater having learned something inspiring. The production design mirrors this commitment to restraint. The kitchen where most of the play unfolds is nearly bare. A table. A chair. A refrigerator. A window. Director Sarah Stern, in her first major Steppenwolf production, has stripped away everything that doesn't matter, which means almost everything matters. When David opens a cabinet and finds nothing, it's not symbolic. It's just a cabinet. When he sits on the kitchen floor at 2 a.m., unable to sleep, it's not a moment of breakdown. It's what insomnia looks like. Meredith's performance is the engine that makes this work. He has the kind of face that registers thought before emotion, which is exactly what Webb's script requires. There are scenes where David is alone for minutes at a time, doing nothing that reads as "active" in the theatrical sense. He's thinking. He's remembering. He's trying not to cry. The seduction of the role—and the trap Meredith avoids—would be to make these moments readable from the back of the theater. Instead, he trusts that the audience came to watch a person, not to witness a performance of personhood. The supporting cast, including actor Nina Arianda as David's sister and a rotating ensemble of characters who drift through his apartment, are equally committed to the play's aesthetic of understatement. Arianda has a scene in the second act where she and David sit on opposite ends of the kitchen table, and she tells him about her own relationship ending. The scene is maybe four minutes long. They barely move. There's no dramatic music. Nothing happens. And yet it's the most moving moment in the play, because Webb has earned the audience's attention through two hours of refusing to manipulate it. The script itself is worth examining. Webb is a Chicago native who studied at Northwestern and has been workshopping "Afterimage" for three years before bringing it to Steppenwolf. The language is deliberately flat in places—characters use the exact words people use when they're trying not to break down, which is to say they use the most ordinary words possible. There's a scene where David calls his mother and tells her the relationship is over. He doesn't explain. She doesn't ask. They both know what's expected—comfort, platitudes, the machinery of family obligation—and they both refuse to perform it. The conversation lasts ninety seconds and says more about love and failure than any monologue could. What's genuinely subversive about "Afterimage" is that it doesn't position queerness as the crisis. The crisis is love ending, which is a human crisis, which means it's a queer crisis, which means the play doesn't need to convince anyone that gay relationships matter. They matter because all relationships matter. Webb trusts that. Stern trusts that. Meredith trusts that. And for an audience trained by decades of queer theater that centers trauma and recovery, that trust feels almost dangerous. There's a moment late in the play where David stands at the window of his apartment, looking out at the Chicago street below. Traffic. Pedestrians. The ordinary apparatus of a city continuing without him. He doesn't make a speech about loneliness or connection. He just watches. And in that watching, in that refusal to make meaning out of the moment, the play becomes something larger than itself—a portrait of what it means to be alive and ordinary and grieving and queer in a city that doesn't particularly care about any of those things except insofar as they affect the rent. "Afterimage" runs through March at Steppenwolf. It's not a comfortable play. It won't make you feel better about yourself. But it might make you feel less alone, which is a different and more honest thing.